


Animal Impulses

by bacchante



Series: Welcome Addiction [1]
Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Blood and Fluff, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Demisexuality, M/M, Mental Instability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 13:20:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3251198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bacchante/pseuds/bacchante
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tale in two parts: in which Suzuya makes a suggestion, and Amon proceeds to lose his grip on reality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Animal Impulses

**Author's Note:**

> Let’s call this an AU because I wrote it with no particular connection to canon in mind and I lazily handwaved so very many things. Warning for slight bloodplay, and canon-typical violence and gore.

**I**

In the first instance, Amon had resisted.

It had been wholly unexpected, which hadn’t helped matters; it was a perfectly ordinary day, with nothing to distinguish it from the rest, and yet—it wasn’t, because it was the day Suzuya chose to perch himself on the desk in front of Amon and plant his feet either side of Amon’s thighs, effectively trapping him.

Amon leaned back and eyed him warningly. “What are you doing?”

Suzuya grinned. “I was thinking about kissing you,” he announced, unselfconscious. “What do you think?”

“ _No_ ,” Amon blurted out quickly. It came out with more of a panicked edge than he would have liked. Well, how was he  _supposed_  to react when teenage colleagues cornered him and brazenly propositioned him? He needed to remove himself from the situation, clearly, but that would have required touching Suzuya to move his legs, and right now the last thing Amon wanted to do was to touch Suzuya. Especially given how unperturbed Suzuya seemed to be by his immediate refusal.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Plenty of reasons,” Amon said. His discomfort was growing by the second. He looked around desperately for an alternative escape route. “We’re co-workers, for a start, and you’re—” insane “—too young for me, and I’m not gay—”

“I could be a girl for you, if you wanted,” Suzuya offered casually.

“What?”

“I’ve had lots of practice,” Suzuya continued. “I didn’t like it at the time, but if it was only for a while, I guess I could—”

He was talking about his time with Big Madame, Amon realized with a cold jolt to his stomach.

“Juuzou, I know you’re a boy. And even if you  _were_  a girl, I still wouldn’t want to kiss you.”

“Why not?” Suzuya repeated, still unfazed.

“Did I not just say?”

“But it looks like fun,” Suzuya protested. “I want to try it.”

“Then try it with someone else!”

“I don’t wanna with anyone else,” Suzuya said matter-of-factly, like he was commenting on the weather, and Amon paused for a moment to consider whether or not  _Juuzou Suzuya_  had just made some kind of confession of attraction to him. “Have  _you_  ever kissed anyone?”

“What?” Amon said again. His thoughts ran immediately to an unbelievably awkward encounter with a drunk girl one New Year’s Eve. To Akira, and the fact that he had been forced to awkwardly dodge her on more than one occasion. “That’s none of your business.”

Suzuya squinted at him. “That’s a weird answer. I thought for sure you’d say yes. Does that mean you really might  _not_  have?”

“This whole conversation is incredibly inappropriate,” Amon choked out. “Please move.”

“I’ll move if you kiss me,” Suzuya said, as if they were playing a game and he was trying to one-up Amon.

“Absolutely not.”

Suzuya sighed and shifted his left leg, letting it dangle. His toes didn’t even scrape the ground. “You’re no fun, Amon.”

“Goodnight,” Amon said, and fled.

⁂

That night Amon dreamed of soft white hair and wide dark eyes, bright red stitches and livid scars on pale skin, and a familiar voice saying  _kiss me, kiss me_. He woke with his heart pounding; covered his eyes with one arm and jerked off, panting, while he was still half-asleep. The residue of the dream clung to him even after he got out of bed, long into the day, no matter how many cups of coffee he had.

He saw Suzuya once, briefly, and he tensed automatically—but Suzuya acted as if nothing had happened yesterday, as if he hadn’t tried to bully a kiss from Amon right here in this office. Amon caught himself studying him carefully, looking for signs of hidden intent, finding none. Suzuya was infuriating at the best of times, but he wasn’t much for deceit, Amon had to admit.

Which meant that Amon was considerably more rattled by the encounter than Suzuya was.  _Of course I am_ , he thought grumpily.  _It was_ his _idea, not mine. Why would it rattle him?_  “I’ll move if you kiss me,” Suzuya said in his memory, and his brain conjured up an impression of what might have happened if Amon  _had_ , if he hadn’t been too afraid to drag Suzuya into his lap by that absurdly sloppy tie and kiss him senseless. That would’ve shown him.

_Get a grip_ , he ordered himself. It was just a stupid one-off incident. Nothing had even  _happened_. He had handled the situation like the professional he was, Suzuya had accepted his rejection with a minimum of fuss, and today there was no problem. There was no reason to dwell on it. And he wouldn’t, he told himself forcefully, starting  _right now_.

⁂

The dream was more vivid this time, more detailed. Amon was almost aware that he was dreaming—walking the borderline between sleep and consciousness, still buried in the images and sensations his subconscious was offering him. Juuzou, warm and bare beneath him, limbs twined around Amon like a particularly pretty snare. Pretty, yes—he couldn’t quite bring himself to think it when he was awake, but it was undeniable here. The flashes of red embedded in his skin at the corner of his mouth had never looked more like an invitation to touch, to lick, to bite. He parted his lips in welcome when Amon bent his head to do just that, and his mouth was as soft and warm as it looked. Tugging gently at the stitches with his teeth produced a faint metallic taste in Juuzou’s kisses and made him hum, purr, like a tiny pale kitten. He arched his back and pushed his hips up against Amon, an unsubtle request that Amon didn’t know how to respond to. He knew roughly what Juuzou had been subjected to in that ghoul’s keeping; his brain stuttered as it tried to incorporate this information into the dream.

He woke before an answer could present itself, hard to the point of pain and frustrated in more ways than one.

⁂

Weeks passed, and the dreams faded slowly. Suzuya remained the same as he ever was, and if Amon avoided him a little more than was strictly excusable, well, he had never been one to seek out Suzuya’s company anyway.

Whether he meant to or not, he spent an inordinate amount of time simply _watching_  the boy—in the office, where he looked desperately out of place, petite and pale and provocatively sutured from his mouth to his throat to his small, strong hands. He seemed lost here, too unsubtle, lacking in the diplomacy necessary to navigate the professional and political currents running through the place. His speech was too plain, too vulgar for Amon’s taste.

And yet.

He was exquisite in the heat of battle, as if violence was the only real outlet for his seemingly infinite energy. His movements were not beautiful in the way Amon had become accustomed to, as a product of the Academy, but they were beautiful nonetheless. Suzuya had never received any formal training—just a brutal upbringing at the hands of a ghoul. His training was in the art of blocking pain, of witnessing agony and horror and taking all of it in as pleasurable. There was joy in his mad, dark eyes when he rent living flesh from bone, when he took a ghoul apart and came up splattered with gore. The blood showed pink in his white hair, as if diluted by contact. He moved quickly—so quickly it took Amon’s breath away, he was  _so fast_ —and if there was a pattern to his movements it was one no one but himself could discern. He was terrifying, and Amon was repulsed and hopelessly intrigued in the same moment.

That Suzuya was broken was abundantly obvious. He didn’t function the way other humans did. He had the viciousness and the unrepentant bloodlust of a ghoul, and Amon wasn’t sure how to reconcile that knowledge with the fact that he was, in truth, a nineteen-year-old human boy with a background more horrifying than Amon could begin to conceive of. His ever-present sense of nobility warred with it. Was it cruel to condemn Suzuya’s actions? He was a sociopathic butcher, certainly, but he slaughtered his victims at the CCG’s behest. Amon wondered if it wasn’t his actions which so disgusted him, but the pleasure he took in them.

The problem irritated at him. He couldn’t neatly codify Juuzou Suzuya as either good or evil, black or white, and that fact alone was unsettling to him. It made him think of another confusing white-haired boy—no, not a boy, a ghoul—well, at least half a ghoul. Amon was conflicted, and he was not often conflicted.

He found himself worrying about him in inopportune moments. Suzuya launched himself into fights with ghouls with as much gleeful enthusiasm as he ever had, but Amon was distracted, falling back on Akira and relying on her to pick up his slack. Unacceptable; he couldn’t afford this kind of sloppy behaviour. He shook himself, ordered himself to focus—and then he heard Suzuya say something odder than usual. His tone was merely interested, but when Amon looked he saw a rapidly-gathering pool of blood on the ground at Suzuya’s feet, and an ugly wound on his side. He looked like a doll that had been torn open by a naughty child—except for the blood. So much blood. How was it possible he was still standing with that much blood on the ground?

Amon didn’t think, didn’t make a sound, didn’t make a single conscious decision—he blinked, and his quinque crushed the skull of the ghoul advancing on the wounded boy. His hands were shaking slightly, but he felt perfectly calm as he hefted the blade, shook the creature off. He had struck with the flat of the blade, as if it were a club—it was solid enough to act as one, evidently. He examined the pulpy mass of tissue where the ghoul’s face had been, and swung the blade up and then down in a quick, neat motion that belied its size, cleanly separating what was left of the head from the neck.

Manic laughter brought him to his senses. Suzuya was standing there, still bleeding freely, and laughing, laughing, laughing. “Amon!” he giggled, wan, and helpless with mirth. “I didn’t know you cared!”

“Shut up,” Amon growled. An unfamiliar surge of unadulterated anger flooded him. “Are you an idiot? You can’t fight with that injury.”

“I can,” Suzuya corrected him innocently, “but I wasn’t trying to. You didn’t give me a chance.” He looked at the body of the ghoul lying on the ground behind Amon. “What a mess!” he said approvingly.

“Get out of here,” Amon snapped. “Get that seen to. I won’t tell you twice, Suzuya.”

Suzuya pouted and glared, but a second look at Amon’s expression seemed to drain the fight out of him. “Yes,  _sir_ ,” he muttered mutinously.

Amon forced himself not to watch him go.

⁂

“I can’t believe you made me leave,” Suzuya complained, not bothering to lower his voice in consideration of the three other occupants of the hospital room.

“You were severely injured,” Amon told him firmly. “You could have died.”

“That’s the job, isn’t it?”

“Your job is to neutralize ghouls, not get yourself killed!”

“It was just a scratch,” Suzuya told him. Anyone else would have been joking, or in denial. It was clear that in Suzuya’s case, this was simply what he believed.

“Thirty-six sutures, Suzuya. It was not a scratch.”

“I’ve had worse,” Suzuya insisted.

“I don’t care! You’re not to fight when injured unless it’s absolutely unavoidable,” Amon snapped. Suzuya rolled his eyes and made a tiny sound of derision. Anger flared in Amon’s chest again, and his hand shot out almost of its own accord to seize Suzuya’s chin and force him to meet Amon’s eyes. “Do I make myself clear?”

Suzuya’s eyes were flat and black, like a shark’s. “Take your hand off me,” he said softly.

Amon did; dropped it instantly, as if burned. “I apologize,” he said stiffly. In the beat of silence that followed, he got to his feet. “I’ll leave you to rest.”

⁂

Suzuya was back at work within the week. It seemed absurd to Amon, who had seen the wound when it was first dealt, nevermind that it was easily concealed beneath Suzuya’s clothes. There was no way he had healed enough to cope with a Ghoul Investigator’s full workload so quickly.

He didn’t say as much, but the thought was clear to read on his face. Akira looked Suzuya over once, dispassionately, and seemed to decide that it wasn’t enough of a problem to warrant her interference. “Leave it,” she told Amon.

“But—”

“Leave it,” she repeated implacably. “We have work to do. I need you focused. Is that going to be a problem for you, Amon?”

“No,” he said automatically. It would have stung more if she wasn’t completely correct in her assessment of the situation; for whatever reason, Suzuya _was_ a concern for Amon, and it was fair to suggest that he might be so compromised by that concern that it would affect his work. Akira Mado was often tactless—or uncaring, Amon couldn’t quite decide which—but she wasn’t malicious. She didn’t ask simply to make him uncomfortable.

“I owe you an apology,” he told her abruptly.

She almost broke stride. Almost. “Oh?”

“I abandoned you to interrupt Suzuya’s fight, and I shouldn’t have. I left you without backup. I’m sorry.”

She heard him out in silence, and eyed him sidelong when he was done. “You protected a colleague. That’s nothing to apologize for. I was fine.”

“I don’t doubt your competence,” he said doggedly, “but nonetheless—”

“Do you doubt Suzuya’s competence?” she interrupted.

“I doubt his mental competence, yes. Don’t you?” he asked, blindsided.

“I’m not his therapist. But I believe he’s perfectly able to conduct himself effectively in combat. It interests me that you’ve seen him fight, and yet your first instinct is to physically protect him.”

“He was injured,” Amon said defensively.

“You and I both know he’s taken down more than one ghoul singlehandedly while injured,” she said.

“I behaved irrationally,” he conceded. “For which I apologize.”

“You acted on instinct. A Ghoul Investigator should never apologize for following their instincts. Now, I think we’ve wasted enough time talking about this, don’t you?”

Amon was growing accustomed to her brusqueness. He swallowed a defeated sigh, and agreed.

⁂

He dreamed of blood in such hyperreal colour it hurt his eyes. Sliding across skin like glacier ice, so pale it was almost blue. It was warm to the touch, though, and it flushed beneath his fingertips. He looked up and saw Juuzou, chewing on his lower lip and humming softly in encouragement, with his eyes closed and his dainty fingers curling in the sheets beneath them.

Amon didn’t have to think; he bowed his head and licked up the blood without hesitation. It tasted sweet, like the candy Juuzou was always eating when he wasn’t supposed to be. That made sense, because it was Juuzou’s blood, although Amon wasn’t sure where exactly he was bleeding from. He didn’t stop to check, because as soon as his tongue swiped the skin near Juuzou’s hip, the boy let out a soft, wanting noise that raced down Amon’s spine and lodged itself somewhere below his navel. Another rivulet of candy-sweet blood touched the tip of his tongue, and he chased it until he found a ridge of bone beneath the skin; the beginning of Juuzou’s ribcage.

The blood was oddly scentless, he realized. The air should have been thick with its metallic reek, but there was nothing. Juuzou squirmed gently as Amon paused to consider this, and when he didn’t move after a few seconds he bucked his hips up against Amon’s chest and whimpered impatiently.

Amon woke suddenly, breathing too hard, half-expecting to be covered in lurid red blood. His room was still and quiet, absent of colour in the darkness, and there was no sweetness lingering in his mouth. He flexed his fingers, trying to rid them of the ghost of dream-Suzuya’s skin. It wasn’t as effective as he’d hoped it would be, so he settled for distraction in the form of an extraordinarily cold shower.

⁂

Suzuya’s stitches tore in the middle of a meeting. He seemed completely oblivious to it, and not for the first time Amon thought that Suzuya’s apparent insensitivity to his own pain might eventually prove more of a hindrance than an advantage. He watched tiny spots of blood bloom on his white shirt, watched him continue the restless flexing that had brought it on in the first place. He was almost horizontal on his chair, kicking against the back of it with his slippered feet, his white hair grazing Shinohara’s arm. His eyes were wide and impatient, a picture of boredom. He had no idea that he was bleeding all over his clothes. It made Amon want to shake him.

He refrained.

He held his peace until the meeting was over, and then he leaned across the table and said in an undertone, “Get your stitches looked at,” while their colleagues filed out of the room.

Suzuya looked down automatically, and—of course—he only seemed mildly amused by the discovery that he had managed to reopen his wound. “Whoops,” he said vaguely, and hiked his shirt up to get a look at the damage. Five stitches had broken free of the skin. “It’s not bad,” Suzuya opined, and began rummaging in his pockets. A moment later he came up with a length of red thread and a sewing needle. Amon almost climbed over the table to stop him, but that would have looked odd, drawn attention. He sat back down, tight-lipped, and Suzuya ignored him entirely as he set a series of tight, neat stitches in the wound.

“That’s filthy,” Amon told him severely. “There’s no way that needle is sterile.”

Suzuya shrugged and smiled, because he never passed up an opportunity to make Amon’s blood boil. “Sterile enough. I’ve never gotten any infections before. And anyway, the bleeding’s stopped now. That’s what you wanted, right?” He hopped off his chair and trailed in Shinohara’s wake, lazily, like he was only marginally concerned about his destination. “Thanks, Amon,” he said blithely, and waved one hand as he passed through the door.

⁂

Amon’s sleep was dreamless, and he woke feeling as if he hadn’t rested at all.

⁂

Suzuya seemed to have abandoned any thoughts he might have had about kisses. He treated Amon much the same as he had always done—excepting that one day, when he had spoken so simply and unexpectedly, when he had backed off with a shrug, like it didn’t matter to him either way. It was nothing to complain about; it was ideal. The only problem was that it _wasn’t_.

Maybe inappropriate ideas were contagious. It was bad enough that Suzuya’s ridiculous proposal had made its way into Amon’s subconscious, but dreams were only dreams—separate from the waking world, no matter how bizarre they became. It was something entirely different when Amon had to fight not to smile over stupid things like Suzuya sneaking snacks right under his superiors’ noses, or when he found himself less sympathetic and more irritated when he overheard other investigators complaining about Suzuya. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand how infuriating and bewildering Suzuya could be—he suspected he understood _that_ better than most—but something in the way they phrased it set his teeth on edge. Yes, Suzuya was often nothing short of a trial to work with, but they weren’t accounting for his sheer _brilliance_.

That, right there, was a thought he wasn’t sure he would have had before Suzuya had cornered him in the office. And how was it related, anyway? It wasn’t as if he thought he was brilliant because he’d had the strangely childish audacity to bring up kissing—not sex, not dating, _kissing_ , as if they were in middle school. That had nothing to do with it, surely. He thought he was brilliant because he was quick and fearless and vicious, and God, Amon hadn’t even thought of himself as the kind of person to _like_ that, but there it was. Suzuya was a peerless weapon, and Amon was beginning to think anyone who couldn’t see that didn’t deserve to work alongside him. Who were they to snipe and criticize, when Suzuya had earned the respect of the best in the business? When he brought down twice as many ghouls as any of the other investigators of his rank? So he was strange—so what? Successful Ghoul Investigators _had_ to be strange, even if they played by the rules. Akira Mado was undoubtedly strange, and she suffered some spite and ill will from her colleagues for it, but she excelled at her work. Amon himself was perhaps a little odd, he had to allow. He preferred to think of it as drive and focus, but not everyone was willing to put aside their personal life to make room for hunting monsters. It wasn’t as if Suzuya was especially singular, to be an eccentric in this line of work.

Except he _was_ singular, and everyone knew it.

People had said that Amon was remarkably young to be climbing the ranks like he was—he was nothing compared to Suzuya, who had come from the darkest place Amon could imagine and clawed his way through miles of paperwork and red tape to become a Rank 2 Investigator while he was still a teenager. He was unconventional even by Ghoul Investigator standards. _Exceptional_ , even by Amon’s standards. He might be the most exasperating person Amon knew, but he deserved better than to be the subject of vindictive water cooler gossip.

“You’ve been glaring at that wall for three unbroken minutes,” Akira told him, appearing suddenly at his elbow. He channelled the urge to flinch into a very slow blink and a very controlled exhalation. “I’m interrupting because I’m beginning to fear it may burst into flame if you keep staring at it with that level of intensity.”

He eyed her sidelong. “Was that a joke?”

“I see it was wasted on you.”

“Sorry.”

“Something on your mind, Amon?”

“The usual,” he lied automatically.

“I see,” she said. She didn’t believe him for a moment. He didn’t care; he just needed to say something that sounded sane, acceptable. She already knew far too much of his feelings concerning Juuzou Suzuya. “Well, if you’ll allow me to distract you from your one-way staring contest, we’ve been invited to interrogate a witness who seems to know something pertaining to the Rabbit Ghoul.”

“Right,” Amon said, trying to sound as if his heart was in it. “Lead on.”

⁂

There was no visual aspect to the dream. It was experienced entirely through his other senses, as if he’d been blinded. Touch; he was hypersensitive, skin to skin with somebody small and lithe, and although he couldn’t see, he was sure that it was Juuzou—of course it was, who else would it be? He lifted one hand and ran his thumb down the centre of the boy’s throat, and yes, there was the row of stitches, lines of thread at neat intervals, leading down past his collarbones. Amon’s fingers followed them down; he imagined watching Juuzou stitch these designs into his skin, naked in front of a mirror, precise and unhesitating in his work. It had struck Amon as sickening and bizarre, once; now, all he could think was how enticing it was, how unique to Juuzou. He breathed in deep, and was flooded by a candy-sweet smell. He ran his thumb over the soft, vulnerable spot beneath Juuzou’s ear, and then ducked his head to taste it. The giggle he heard at that was unique to Juuzou, too, high-pitched and unselfconsciously loud. It was such a recklessly joyous sound. Amon considered tracing his fingers down Juuzou’s sides just to see if he was ticklish, if there was some way to elicit that kind of sound from him at any moment.

He woke slowly, and lay in the predawn quiet with hazy contentedness welling in his chest like blood from a wound.

⁂

Amon decided to stop resisting. It was a strange decision to make, he supposed, at this late stage; but it still felt like a weight off his shoulders. If nothing else, he’d given himself permission to stop trying to avoid Juuzou at every turn. He didn’t need to _do_ anything—he only needed to stop trying so hard _not_ to.

Which is why, when Shinohara invited the room at large to dinner one night, and Suzuya’s pale head shot up like a wolf scenting prey, Amon did not demur. Akira eyed him curiously; she hadn’t expected him to join them. He had been less than subtle, he supposed.

If he accepted the invitation in an effort to re-establish a sense of normality, it was something of a wasted effort. He ordered without glancing at the menu, ate his meal without tasting it. Akira had three beers and he didn’t bother to glare at her once. He was busy trying to appear as if he was looking toward the other end of the table for some other reason than to watch Suzuya talk. Judging by Akira’s increasingly snide comments in his ear, he was failing miserably, but there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it. Every time he forced himself to concentrate on something else, he was still maddeningly aware of Suzuya’s hands flickering through the air as he talked, the cadence of his voice, his white hair catching the light and throwing it back like a beacon. His presence was so _loud_ , Amon wondered how anyone managed to behave as if he wasn’t the only person in the room.

He very pointedly did not drink. Akira did, with one eye on him, as if hoping to get a rise out of him. So did Suzuya—surreptitiously, from other people’s glasses—although he wrinkled his nose at the beer in Shinohara’s glass and opted instead for Takizawa’s sweet apple cider. It reddened his cheeks until they almost matched his stitches, and made his gestures broader, his syllables more fluid. It was ridiculously charming—although Shinohara did not appear to share this view, judging by the way he kept trying to shift the glass from Suzuya’s field of view when he wasn’t paying attention.

No one in particular made the call that the meal was over, but at some point there was the familiar change in atmosphere that meant they were either going to keep drinking well into the night, or quit while they were ahead and leave now. Amon, perfectly sober, and with a head uncomfortably full of Suzuya, couldn’t wait to get out of there. Akira knew it; she teased him on the way out. “Hey, Amon, you’re not going to make sure I get home safe again?” He couldn’t be sure whether she was speaking so loudly on purpose. She _was_ a little tipsy, but nothing like she’d been the last time.

“You need a babysitter?” he asked. It was cold of him, perhaps. If it meant he wouldn’t find himself counting push-ups on her bedroom floor while she slept off her drinks in her underwear on the bed, he was willing to be cold.

She squinted appraisingly at his expression, and seemed to understand his resolve. She didn’t make any further remarks except to bid him goodnight.

Suzuya, on the other hand.

“You and Miss Mado?” he asked, peering up at Amon in the semi-darkness. Unabashedly nosy. “Is that why you wouldn’t kiss me?”

Amon’s heart gave an almost painful _thump_ at the unexpected acknowledgement of the incident. He’d begun to wonder if Suzuya really had forgotten about it.

“No,” he said. Cleared his throat. “We’re colleagues. Nothing more.”

“You and I?” Suzuya asked slyly. “Or you and her?”

“Both,” Amon said staunchly.

Suzuya performed an odd series of actions at that: clicked his tongue, snapped his fingers, and swung his arms out wide, as if balancing on a tightrope. He _was_ rather unsteady on his feet—an unsettling sight. It was the first time Amon had seen him move with anything other than feline grace.

“How many drinks have you had?” Amon found himself asking, like he was the boy’s mother. “Are you going to walk home alone?”

“Why? Are you going to accompany me? Make sure I don’t get lost?” Suzuya giggled. “I’m not sure where I’m going. I don’t want to go home.” He didn’t offer an explanation for this. “Where are _you_ going? Are _you_ walking home?”

“Yes.”

He waited for Suzuya to say, ‘Can I come?’ but he didn’t. He only nodded and turned his back on Amon, setting off with a slight wobble in his step towards a dark side street. Amon bit the inside of his cheek, but it did no good, he couldn’t keep himself from asking—

“Do you want to come with me?”

God, it sounded even worse out loud than it had in his head. Suzuya paused, but didn’t turn. Flustered, Amon kept talking, trying to rectify his mistake: “I don’t live far from here, and if you don’t have anywhere else to be…I mean, I’m going home to sleep, but I have a TV, or…” _I have a TV_ ; incredible. “Nevermind,” he finished lamely, and tried to tell himself he wasn’t blushing as he turned and hurried off with his chin tucked low and his coat collar pulled up to obscure his face.

After a few moments, he heard the soft scuffing of slippers following him. He slowed to let Suzuya catch up to him.

They didn’t speak in the fifteen minutes it took to reach Amon’s apartment. It was a mixed blessing; it gave Amon time to try to collect his thoughts, to figure out what he was _doing_ , inviting a slightly drunk Suzuya to his home in the middle of the night—but the silence made him too tense to think. Suzuya was hardly ever just _quiet_ , so why was he suddenly so reticent? It wasn’t as if Amon had forced him to come along. Maybe he was waiting for Amon to say something. He was going to be waiting a long time, because Amon could barely concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other right now, let alone making polite small talk.

Suzuya broke the silence when Amon unlocked the door to his apartment and showed him in. “Do you ever stop working?” This, as he eyed the piles of paper stacked on the coffee table in front of the TV.

“Of course I do,” Amon said blankly. “I have to sleep, or I would be a danger to myself and to my colleagues in the field.”

Suzuya was looking at him as if he was torn between amusement and profound boredom. Amon decided to make a tactical retreat.

“I’m going to bed,” he announced. “Help yourself to whatever you like. Don’t break anything, please.”

“I wouldn’t,” Suzuya lied.

Amon expected to lie awake until dawn, listening to Suzuya doing whatever it was he was doing in his kitchen; but once his head hit the pillow, he found that he was exhausted enough to sleep despite the strange situation, and between one breath and the next, it seemed, he faded out.

⁂

The dream was so familiar by now it felt almost comfortable. The sensations were as vivid as ever—smooth skin and lean muscle shifting slowly under his hands, soft hair, and the warm rush of blood at the pulse point in the boy’s throat. He smelled different this time, not like artificial candy, more like laundry detergent and—Amon chased the scent, pressing his nose into the soft skin beneath Suzuya’s jaw—something like red meat?

Quiet laughter drew him out of his sleep, and for a few paralysing moments his mind went perfectly blank. He had been dreaming—he _had_ —but he hadn’t. Or at least, he hadn’t dreamt all of it. Because the Suzuya in his bed—in his arms, in his _hands_ , God help him—was unmistakeably real.

“That tickled,” Suzuya informed him, and even in the darkness of the room, Amon could make out his brilliant smile.

Amon’s brain suddenly kicked into gear, and he recoiled so hard he nearly shoved Suzuya off the side of the bed. The boy scrambled onto his knees with an indignant sound.

“What are you doing in here?” Amon demanded.

“You said I could come to your place,” Suzuya sounded positively petulant. Amon’s heart was thundering unpleasantly in his chest. Exactly what had he done while he was asleep?

“I said you could come over. I didn’t say you could _get in bed with me_.”

Suzuya shifted; Amon guessed he was shrugging. “It was too cold to sleep on the sofa. Besides, _you_ started touching _me_ , not the other way around.”

“I was asleep!” Amon spluttered. He was glad it was dark, because he was quite sure he hadn’t blushed this hard in a number of years, and things were bad enough without Suzuya witnessing _that_ as well.

“You should’ve stayed asleep,” Suzuya grumbled. “You were nicer that way.”

Amon needed to ask what had happened. He needed to know what he’d _done_. The only problem was, he wasn’t sure he could trust himself to speak without yelling, or saying something terrible that would make him regret this even more come morning.

He couldn’t continue this conversation right now.

With that decided, he felt suddenly calmer. “I’ll take the sofa,” he declared.

“Don’t be stupid,” Suzuya said. He looked mostly awake, but he was blinking more than usual, as if his eyes wanted to stay closed. “I’ll go.”

“What?”

“It’s almost dawn. I should go.” He smothered a yawn and all but rolled off the bed. “See you Monday.”

Amon didn’t reply, but Suzuya wasn’t waiting. He looked steadier on his feet than he had last night as he traipsed out of Amon’s bedroom, raking his fingers through his hair and adjusting his hairclips.

**II**

 

In the first instance, Amon had resisted. In the second, he decided to save his energy.

The office was a familiar setting, but Suzuya made no attempt to physically trap him this time. Instead he leaned down on his desk, forearms and belly flush with the polished wood, and peered curiously at Amon’s face.

“You _do_ want to kiss me, don’t you?” he mused aloud, apropos of nothing.

“It’s not that simple,” Amon told him honestly.

Suzuya frowned. “It’s not?”

“No.”

Suzuya hummed thoughtfully. “Do you know what you did when you were sleeping?”

Amon’s stomach twisted. “No.”

“You held me like I was a doll,” Suzuya recalled, “like you were scared I was going to break. You petted my hair and stuck your nose in here—” he indicated the underside of his jaw with one finger, smiling, mischievous. “It tickled. Made me laugh. You woke up then, and you know the rest.” He shrugged. “That’s all.”

“I’m sorry. I should never have—I wouldn’t have, if I’d had any idea—”

Suzuya was giggling. Amon stopped short. “You think you _hurt_ me?” Suzuya asked, incredulous.

It sounded ridiculous when he said it like that. “No,” Amon said uncertainly.

“Then why are you apologising?”

“Because I shouldn’t have done what I did.”

“You were asleep. You didn’t know. And anyway, I didn’t mind.” He slid forward on the desk, switching his attention to Amon’s hands—one pressed flat against the desk, the other frozen in the midst of writing a correction on a report. “The last time someone touched me like that I took his hands.” Amon wasn’t going to ask how. “But I didn’t mind when you did.”

“I appreciate you letting me keep them,” Amon said, a little dryly.

Suzuya held up one of his own hands, small, delicate, threaded with bright red patterns. “They’re so much bigger than mine,” he marvelled. Amon put his pen down and tried not to think how much a child Suzuya still seemed, despite his age, despite his grim experience. There was no reason why a child couldn’t be trained to kill, Amon mused. He was looking proof of that right in the eyes.

“Juuzou, why did you bring up kissing, that day?”

Suzuya shrugged again. “I had been thinking about it.”

“Why?”

Suzuya’s face fell a little. “I don’t know,” he hedged. “I just…think about it sometimes. Don’t you?”

“Yes, but—” _But I haven’t been through what you’ve been through. But I don’t decorate myself with stitches. But I didn’t frighten anyone who knew me growing up._ He sighed. “I’m older than you.”

“I’m almost twenty,” Juuzou informed him.

“I know,” Amon said. “It’s just—you’re so—”

“Childish?” Juuzou supplied, with a wry tilt to his mouth. “I know, I know. I’m small and I don’t dress the way anyone else wants me to and I like sweets. You think I can’t take care of myself. But I can.”

“I know that,” Amon protested. “That isn’t what worries me.”

“We grew up differently,” Juuzou said, a little dreamily. “That’s all. You worry me, too. You’re too caught up in things that shouldn’t matter.”

Amon bristled. “You’re too careless!”

“Is that why you won’t kiss me?”

“You’re my colleague,” Amon repeated mechanically.

“Even though you want to?”

“You have no idea what I want, Suzuya. And I don’t think you know what you’re asking for.”

He half-expected him to argue, but he only stared inquiringly. “Oh?”

“Kisses aren’t just kisses,” Amon told him, wondering how to explain a concept he only had theoretical knowledge of to a boy whose early socialisation had consisted of little more than torture. He had no way of knowing how Suzuya thought of something like physical affection. Apparently he had chosen Amon to explain it to him, if his attentive expression was any indication. “Most of the time, if someone kisses someone else, it changes their relationship. Even if it’s only once.”

“Hm,” Suzuya said. “Yeah, I know.”

“You know,” Amon repeated dubiously.

“Sure. I’ve seen couples before.”

Amon sighed. “That’s not exactly what I meant.” Then he thought about what Suzuya had just said. “ _Couples_?”

“Oh,” Suzuya said faintly, and blushed.

Amon was struck by the plain embarrassment on Suzuya’s face, such an unfamiliar expression for him. For some reason it made Amon bold—maybe because it proved that Suzuya really did have ordinary human emotions buried under all that bloodlust and psychopathy—or maybe because it was the first time he’d ever seen him drawn up short by serious consideration of something that _deserved_ serious consideration. Either way, he found himself lifting one hand and lightly framing Suzuya’s cheek with his fingers. His skin was perfectly smooth and flushed hot with shame, and Amon was utterly transfixed.

“You’re my subordinate,” he said quietly. “The office gossip would run rampant. They’d say I was taking advantage.” He wasn’t entirely convinced he _wouldn’t_ be taking advantage.

“Who cares?” Suzuya said philosophically.

Amon decided he didn’t. Suzuya seemed to read it in his expression, because he was already in motion, swinging over the desk and sliding over the edge to balance carefully right on Amon’s lap. For someone so small he was unexpectedly overwhelming at close quarters; he was composed of such fascinating details, bright stitches and silvery strands of hair, shell-pink fingernails and eyes a peculiar colour that seemed black one moment and very dark red the next. Like blood spilled under starlight, Amon thought, and then he immediately ordered his brain to stop producing terrible poetry about Suzuya’s eyes.

He didn’t have time to argue with himself, because that was the moment Suzuya chose to link his arms around Amon’s neck and tentatively brush his nose against Amon’s. He was smiling, his eyes lowered now, and for half a heartbeat Amon almost panicked. They were past the point of negotiations or internal debates—he had to choose, to do it, or not.

He did.

More specifically, he closed his eyes, touched his nose to Juuzou’s again to find his bearings, and kissed him. Juuzou made a faint sound—surprise or satisfaction, Amon couldn’t tell—and kissed back shyly. Amon had never known him to do _anything_ shyly. He was brazen to the last, and yet here, he faltered.

Amon eased off, giving him room to bolt if that was what he needed to do. Juuzou let him break the kiss, but chased him when he pulled back, tightening his arms around his neck and pressing their foreheads together. They shared breath for a moment, and then Juuzou ducked his head and found Amon’s mouth again. He was less shy this time. It was dizzying.

Amon didn’t quite realize what he was doing with his hands until Juuzou muttered, “Harder,” and wrapped his fingers tight around Amon’s wrist, where he had his hand sunk into Juuzou’s hair. He had been pulling gently at it without really meaning to. “Come on,” Juuzou pleaded— _whined_ , for the love of God, “I’m not going to break, you can pull harder than that—”

He broke off and whined again, wordlessly, when Amon curled his fingers into his hair and gave a careful, deliberate tug. Juuzou’s head jerked back, his mouth falling open, his eyes shut. His back formed an exquisite arch, his hips and stomach pressed hard against Amon in an effort to counterbalance. His chin was pulled up and back, exposing his throat, and Amon couldn’t help staring at the decorative stitches running down the length of it. They spiralled down his arm, too, painstakingly neat, reaching even to his fingertips on one hand. Amon imagined the thread coming loose, winding around his own throat like a thin red serpent, binding them together. Fate.

He had Juuzou’s shirt hiked up around his waist before he had really thought it through. He didn’t care that it was mid-afternoon and the building was full of people going about their workday, he didn’t care that if someone happened to open the door there would be no mistaking what was going on; all he cared about was finding out _exactly_ where those stitches ended.

Juuzou’s skin was ice-pale, almost transparent. The stitches ended where the dip of his navel began. Amon brought his free hand up to press his thumb against the final stitch, glancing up at Juuzou’s face as he did.

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” Juuzou said. It sounded like a complaint.

If he was expecting Amon to tear into him, to _make_ it hurt, he was going to be disappointed. Juuzou might have been brutalized to the point where that sounded like fun to him, but Amon had not. He smoothed his fingers gently over the stitches, drawing a hiss of confused frustration from the boy above him, and then released his hair.

Juuzou tilted his head forward and frowned down at him. “What?” he asked blankly.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Amon told him bluntly.

Juuzou took a moment to process this. “Then what do you want?” he asked, shoulders slumped, puzzlement writ large across his face. It made Amon’s chest ache.

“I don’t know how to answer that without sounding condescending,” he admitted. “It’s…You shouldn’t expect people to want to hurt you.”

“Why not? Plenty of people do.”

“You think _I_ do?”

“Well.” Juuzou paused, thinking. “No,” he decided eventually. “I don’t think so.” He cocked his head and frowned at him again. “You know I like it, though. Right?”

“I’m not sure that’s something I want to encourage,” Amon muttered.

“ _Encourage_?” Juuzou echoed, and ground his hips down. His eyes lit with amusement when Amon abruptly realized the point he was trying to make—that he might have been castrated, yes, and maybe he wasn’t going to be producing any offspring in this lifetime, but it seemed he could still react physically to being kissed senseless and having his hair pulled.

“Oh,” Amon said stupidly.

“You’re even more of a virgin than I am,” Juuzou scoffed.

“I didn’t—I wasn’t sure if—hm.”

“Hm?” Juuzou repeated mockingly, but he was smiling happily at Amon’s discomfort, so Amon supposed it wasn’t _all_ bad.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to—if you’d _want_ to—”

“Because of the—?” Juuzou illustrated his point with a series of graphic gestures, and Amon forced himself to nod instead of flinching. “I’m not really interested in sex,” Juuzou admitted airily.

Amon could feel himself failing to keep his confusion from showing on his face. “You’re not,” he said slowly.

“No, but _you_ are,” Juuzou grinned. “And I’m curious.”

“Wait,” Amon said, but Juuzou didn’t seem any more inclined to obedience than he usually was. He caught the boy’s wrist as he tried to slip questing fingers past Amon’s belt. “I said _wait_.”

Juuzou did, reluctantly.

“This is a bad idea,” Amon started, and the expression on Juuzou’s face told him instantly that that had been a poor opening line for his argument. “I don’t want to do this—any of this—if you’re not going to _like_ it.”

“I don’t know if I’d like it,” Juuzou shot back. “That’s the point. I want to _try_ it.”

Amon quelled the urge to shove him off his lap and send him sprawling on the floor. “And you want me for a test subject?” he said finally.

Juuzou smiled like he knew exactly how galling the idea was, like he wanted to test the limits of Amon’s tolerance. “Are you offended?”

“Not offended.” Amon couldn’t think what he _was_ , but he wasn’t offended. It made a strange kind of sense, for someone like Juuzou. His experience of human social interaction was skewed at best; it wasn’t surprising that he should approach it now with this kind of clinical inquisitiveness. The thing that struck Amon as peculiar was the fact that he himself was the one Juuzou had chosen to play lab rat: a colleague; a man; someone who treated him impersonally, criticized him, gave him unwelcome directives on missions. Aside from that, Amon felt himself painfully unqualified for the role Juuzou had assigned him.

There was no point pretending otherwise. “I’m not sure I can do what you want me to,” he admitted.

Juuzou raised both eyebrows and pointed down at Amon’s lap. “It doesn’t look like you’re having much trouble so far.” Amon opened his mouth to protest that that wasn’t what he meant, but Juuzou was already laughing and interrupting: “This is why I wanted you. You don’t even like me and you’re still concerned about ‘doing the right thing’ or whatever you want to call it.”

Amon wanted to argue. _I do like you_ , he thought. _That’s the problem_. Instead he shook his head. “You should leave, Juuzou.”

Juuzou frowned. “And then what?”

“Pretend this never happened. And choose someone else,” Amon advised.

“Huh.” Juuzou sat back, pushed his tongue into his cheek, studied Amon’s expression. “If that’s what you want,” he said finally. He sounded stunned, disbelieving.

He closed the door behind him when he went, and Amon was left with an uncomfortable combination of crushing disappointment, frustration, and triumph at having finally done something to shock Juuzou.

That night he dreamed more vividly than ever. Juuzou, thin and ashen, perched precariously on the edge of a rooftop—how far to the ground? Amon couldn’t see, but the wind was unforgiving and bitterly cold, and Juuzou was digging his fingertips into concrete to stay still under its onslaught. He was leaning so far over the edge. Amon tried to take a step toward him, tried to put out a hand to pull him back, but his limbs wouldn’t obey him. He was frozen in place, a useless spectator. He knew, with that strange certainty that comes only in dreams, that sooner or later Juuzou would fall.

He woke with anxiety sunk heavy in his stomach, fighting the beginnings of what he knew would become a panic attack if he didn’t head it off. He sat up quickly, forced his spine straight, and breathed deep.

⁂

As luck would have it, the next time Amon saw Suzuya it was in the midst of a raid on a ghoul hideout. Families—Amon wouldn’t have called them that aloud, but that was what they were. Parents and children, not a one of them displaying kagune or battle skill familiar to any of the agents pursuing them. Could they even hunt for themselves? He suspected the adults couldn’t, and the children—the younger ghouls weren’t old enough to have been given the chance.

Amon had never thought of ghouls as _people_. That would be a fallacy. But even he hesitated in the face of a small, screaming child, recoiling from the blood staining the floor at its feet, with its monstrous eyes screwed tight shut, so it looked for all the world like an ordinary kid.

Suzuya swept past him in a pale blur, buried two small quinque blades in the ghoul’s forehead before Amon could take another breath.

“Are you here to kill them, or to frighten them?” There was an edge to his tone that Amon didn’t know how to interpret. Suzuya’s eyes had darkened almost to black in the dim light of the single bulb in the hallway—the only one to have survived the initial confusion of the raid—and one of the stitches at his lip had been torn free of the skin there. A thin trickle of blood was smeared beneath it, as if Suzuya had swiped distractedly at it, and his lip was starting to swell.

“Are you alright?” Amon blurted out.

Suzuya’s eyes narrowed. “You’re slow tonight. That one could’ve had you.”

Amon glanced down at the ghoul—the little girl—sprawled against the wall like she’d been tossed there by some careless giant, with twin hilts protruding from her forehead. There was very little blood. Her eyes were still closed.

“Thank you,” he said distantly.

He didn’t see Suzuya frown, didn’t see him square his stance, and barely reacted in time to keep himself from staggering when two small hands planted themselves on either side of his chest and _shoved_.

“Suzuya!” he barked, more out of surprise than anger.

“What is _wrong_ with you?” Suzuya demanded, rounding on him. His expression was almost petulant, as if Amon had refused him something for no good reason.

Amon opened his mouth to say, ‘That’s my line!’ What came out instead was, “I don’t know.”

They stared at each other for a moment—Amon struggling with sudden and unwelcome vulnerability, Suzuya glaring as if he was one more uncharacteristic comment away from flaying Amon where he stood.

“We don’t have time for this,” Amon declared finally. He turned toward the door, but Suzuya interrupted his exit. He darted into the hallway ahead of Amon, having conjured more quinques from God-knows-where, and calling over his shoulder, “Don’t get killed, dumbass!”

Amon shook his head. “I didn’t know you cared,” he muttered, and set out to find Akira.

⁂

Amon had never been squeamish. Blood didn’t worry him. Gore didn’t turn his stomach. But he could feel dried blood flaking from his skin for days after that raid, even when he looked and saw there was nothing there.

Akira noticed; she stood quietly and watched him scratching at phantom irritations, but she never mentioned it directly. Instead she told him, rather sharply, to go home and get some sleep when he looked like he was planning to work overtime. As if sleep would help. He almost laughed at the thought.

When he opened the door to his apartment and found Suzuya sprawled across his sofa like he owned the place, he felt something akin to hysteria crawling up his throat, and had to clamp down even harder to keep it from bursting past his lips like a lungful of blood.

Suzuya swung his snowy head around to watch him struggle, and eventually—when the silence seemed like it was set to continue indefinitely—he sighed and said, “This place is way too easy to break into. I don’t know how you can sleep here.”

“You’ve slept here,” Amon shot back immediately.

“That was before I knew you don’t lock your windows.”

Amon shrugged. “Anything capable of hurting me isn’t going to be deterred by a locked window.”

“You really think you’re bulletproof, huh?”

“I think I’m more likely to be killed on the job than I am in my own home. And ghouls scare me more than guns do.”

Suzuya huffed and tipped himself off the sofa. “You’d be just as dead either way.” He bent down to rifle through the papers that were still piled on the coffee table, a show of idle interest that Amon didn’t buy for a second.

“Is that why you’re here? To highlight the fact of my mortality?” he asked.

Suzuya shrugged.

“Next time you might consider using the front door.”

Suzuya didn’t appear to be listening; he was pacing the room aimlessly, and Amon still hadn’t moved from the doorway. He did so slowly, watching Suzuya as if he were a wild animal, liable to attack at any moment. He wondered if he should just make a break for his room, barricade himself in there until Suzuya got bored and left. Then he reluctantly conceded that that would be ridiculous, and he needed to deal with this like an adult.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” he declared. “You’re welcome to come with me, if you like.”

Suzuya raised both eyebrows in an expression of almost comical surprise. “Really?”

“Why not?”

“I thought you’d go back to avoiding me,” Suzuya said, because he wouldn’t know tact if it walked up and slapped him in the face. He’d probably feed tact its own organs, and laugh while he did it.

“I’m not avoiding you,” Amon said. “And if I was, you’d be making it very difficult, since you _broke into my home_. I could have you reprimanded.”

“You’re not going to, though.”

“No.”

“And you _are_ paying for dinner,” Suzuya concluded cheerfully, breezing past him into the hallway. He was making a habit of doing that, Amon noted vaguely.

“You have to order an actual meal, though. Don’t just sit down and ask to see the dessert menu.”

“You’re so boring, Amon.”

Amon just shrugged. It was probably true.

Suzuya ordered two different desserts, and Amon sat quietly and let him steal food off his plate. Despite having been the one to suggest dinner, he found he wasn’t really hungry enough to eat. He rubbed his thumb over a non-existent streak of blood on his wrist and breathed in deep. Someone was wearing overpowering perfume, musky, old-fashioned. At least it didn’t smell coppery.

It wasn’t like him to be so rattled by his work, but he supposed it had to happen sooner or later. There would be no point talking about it. He would wait for it to pass; and it would. That was all.

A red-stitched hand entered his vision, waving impatiently. “Amon!”

He blinked and looked down at Suzuya, who had been trying to get his attention for a while, if his irritated expression was any indication.

“Pay up and let’s get out of here,” he ordered.

“Right,” Amon said vaguely. He paid the bill without noticing the price. It didn’t make any difference; it wasn’t like he wouldn’t be able to cover it. He tried to remember the last time he spent money on something other than food or utilities and came up blank.

“Move,” Suzuya was saying, pushing Amon in front of him with both hands pressing into the small of his back. Amon wanted to protest this treatment—it was embarrassing, and too personal—but less than a week ago Suzuya had been grinding down on his lap in his office, and now it seemed ridiculous to object to palms flat against his suit jacket on the grounds that it was ‘too personal’. He let Suzuya shove him forward for a few steps, until he seemed satisfied that he was going to walk unaided from here on out, and then his hands fell away and he contented himself with walking at Amon’s side.

He had redone the stitch at his lip that had been torn loose in the raid. It still looked irritated, the skin red and slightly swollen. Amon wanted to comment on it, but instead he said, “Don’t break into my apartment again.”

Suzuya shrugged and didn’t reply.

⁂

He didn’t have to break in a second time to seem ever-present. Amon walked past the pile of papers on the coffee table half a dozen times, each time pausing with the intention of picking it up and making an attempt to organize it, but his hands refused to comply. He imagined Juuzou’s fingerprints all over those pages, marked out in blood, or perhaps dye from his stitches. Tiny red fingerprints had begun to spring up everywhere he looked. He carried a black silk scarf in his pocket to wrap around his hand whenever he needed to open doors around his apartment or at work. Gloves would be too obvious, would require an explanation. How was he supposed to explain this without sounding as if his sanity was slipping?

He was just fine, he knew. It was an odd habit—and the fingerprints were a little strange—but in his line of business, very little _wasn’t_ strange. It was to be expected. It was nothing to worry about. If he just put his head down and got on with his work, it would all fade to background noise.

“You look terrible,” Akira told him flatly. “Go home.”

“Stop telling me to go home.” He had to concentrate to ungrit his teeth. “I’m fine.”

“Is this about Suzuya again?”

“In what way would this be about _Suzuya_ , exactly?”

“I don’t know.” He had never heard her sound subdued before. It didn’t suit her. “Why do you do that thing with the scarf?”

He didn’t answer; he rapped his pen irritably against his desk and stared hard at the file he had open in front of him. The sentences seemed to crawl across the page, as if they didn’t want to be read.

“Amon,” Akira said slowly. “You’re not fine. You need rest. Or help.”

“What I need is to do my job,” he said shortly. “Do you mind?”

⁂

Suzuya walked in through the front door, although the windows still weren’t locked. Amon recalled telling him that he should do exactly this the next time he wanted to come visiting, so he supposed he didn’t have grounds to complain.

“Miss Mado’s worried about you,” the boy declared, apropos of nothing. “Why?”

Amon closed his briefcase on the last of the papers he’d cleared off the coffee table. He was in shirtsleeves and black kidskin gloves; he hoped the disparity wouldn’t be too obvious to Suzuya. “Because I’m behaving strangely,” he said finally.

“Are you?”

“I just said so.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t help it.”

“Ah.” Suzuya ceased his questioning immediately, as if this was the satisfactory answer he had been seeking. Maybe he related to the concept of uncontrollable strangeness. “They’re thinking of forcing you to use up some of your annual leave, you know.”

Amon paused in the act of removing his gloves. “Who’s ‘they’?”

Suzuya waved his fingers vaguely through the air. “People I keep tabs on. People in high places.”

Amon shook his head slowly. “I suppose I should be flattered to have gotten the attention of anyone in _high places_.”

Suzuya glanced at him in surprise. “Hm. So that’s why Mado’s so worried about you.” He didn’t sound particularly concerned. He cocked his head thoughtfully. “Well, come on, then.”

Amon looked at him. “What?” he asked blankly.

“Shower!” Suzuya said impatiently. “You look like you haven’t slept in days. You need a shower, and sleep.”

“I’m not tired.”

“I am!” Suzuya said, and trotted down the hallway towards Amon’s bathroom. Amon felt a jolt in his chest at the casual intrusion, and immediately followed—silently cursing Suzuya, who knew that arguing with Amon wouldn’t do half as much to get him moving as simply _doing_ something he didn’t like.

And perhaps he knew, too, that nothing would put a stop to Amon’s protests as quickly and effectively as the simple act of sliding stupid polka-dotted suspenders off his shoulders as he walked. They hung down below his waist, swaying with his movement, clinging to him by three silver clips. Amon was so mesmerized by them, he barely noticed that Suzuya was unbuttoning his shirt until it hit the floor, and then all Amon could see was the pale expanse of his bare back rising above the waistband of his trousers. There was something maddeningly vulnerable about the way his hair grazed the nape of his neck as he moved. It drove Amon to speak, finally—as if to protect Suzuya from himself—but all he could find to say was, “Stop,” and all _that_ achieved was to make Suzuya smile indulgently over his shoulder as he stepped into the bathroom regardless.

He turned to face Amon when he perched on the edge of the bathtub to kick his slippers off. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “about those times in your office. I think I know what your problem is.”

“My problem is that you’re not putting your clothes back on right now,” Amon said, hoping he sounded cold. He didn’t _feel_ very cold. He wasn’t much of an actor.

“Your problem,” Suzuya continued blithely, “is that you’re thinking of me as a child. Right?” He stood up, bare-chested and barefoot, and his trousers joined the rest of his clothes on the floor. Either no one had ever bothered to introduce him to the concept of underwear, or he simply preferred to go without. Amon kept his gaze fixed on a small spot of flesh just above his left clavicle, and did _not_ look for scarring.

Suzuya was still talking. “That was your problem with that ghoul, too. Right?”

Amon found himself unable to answer.

“I’m not a child,” Suzuya told him. “And that ghoul was just another ghoul. I don’t know why you’re so horrified by the idea of hurting children—” _of course you don’t, why would you?_ —“but you haven’t.”

Amon tried to speak, but what came out were the words “My father—” and then he forced himself back into silence, because that was _not_ a conversation he wanted to have with anyone, let alone Suzuya.

“I don’t know about your father,” Suzuya said casually, “but the closest thing I ever had to a mother did this to me.” His gesture included his whole body, the scars, the absences, the stitches—first aid for an injury no longer tangible, for effects too far-reaching to undo.

He approached Amon calmly, and when he reached up and started unbuttoning his shirt it was almost impersonal. “She made me what I am,” he continued softly, “and _I’m_ not seeing blood where it’s not.”

Amon met his eyes, startled. “How did you know about that?”

Suzuya shrugged. “I watched you. It took me a while to figure it out, but I’m not _stupid_.”

Amon frowned. “I know you’re not.”

“Good. Then do you want to know what else I figured out?”

_Not really, but you’re going to tell me anyway_.

Suzuya pushed Amon’s shirt off his shoulders, and Amon let it fall. Small fingers traced their way along the edge of the largest scar on his torso; his touch wasn’t cold, but Amon shivered. “I misjudged you,” Suzuya admitted. “I thought you didn’t like me. But you do, don’t you? That’s why you wouldn’t fuck me when I asked you to.”

“You make it sound disgusting,” Amon protested faintly.

“Humans are disgusting,” Suzuya said dismissively. “Lower your standards. Even you—” and here his lips curled into a tiny, feline smile, “Even _you_ are down here in the muck with all the rest of us. You’re not as pristine as you’d like to be.”

“I know that.”

“You think you’re filthy in ways you’re not. That’s not self-awareness, that self-delusion. You keep punishing yourself for the wrong things.”

“So what do I _deserve_ to be punished for, then?”

“For being such a righteous prick all the time!” Suzuya snapped, and Amon blinked, surprised at the sudden harshness. “For running yourself into the ground and making everyone worry about you.”

“You shouldn’t bother,” Amon muttered. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Suzuya huffed and rolled his eyes. His fingers made short work of Amon’s trousers, and he pushed them down with the same cool detachment he had maintained for this whole bizarre encounter. When he was satisfied with his work, and Amon stood uncomfortably bare in his stark white surroundings, Suzuya went back to the bathtub and got the shower running. He stuck a hand beneath the stream to judge the temperature, and then somehow managed to make climbing into a bathtub look elegant.

“Come here, please,” he said, with his wet hair sticking to his cheeks. He was strangely colourful here, flushed with pinks and golds, his irises bloody-burgundy and his lips a shock of red as vibrant as the scarlet thread decorating his skin. He looked like a being of pure light, wreathed in stitches, or perhaps held together by them. Amon couldn’t have told him ‘no’ if he’d wanted to.

His hands felt less impersonal now, with both of them trading off for space beneath the spray, their skin hot from the water and the steam. Suzuya wouldn’t let Amon do a thing for himself; he insisted on washing him with nothing but soap-slick hands. His fingers were more shamelessly curious than deliberately provocative, and Amon considered his self-control to be above average, but there was only so much he could _do_ in this situation.

“Suzuya,” he said, unsure whether he meant it as an objection or an invitation.

“Koutarou,” Suzuya said, voice echoing into a purr. Amon shut his mouth. Suzuya waited for a moment, watching him carefully. “Do you want me to stop?” Amon couldn’t answer, couldn’t find a good way to say _No, but I should_. “You worry too much,” Suzuya told him, as if he could hear his thought. It was probably easy enough to read it on his face.

Suzuya let one hand fall and reached past Amon with the other to turn the shower off. He allowed a pause to dry off, and then hustled him down the hallway to his bedroom. “Sleep,” he decreed, and in spite of every instinct, Amon did.

⁂

He woke once in the night; he didn’t know the time, and couldn’t check, because Suzuya’s head on the pillow beside him was blocking his view of the clock he kept on his nightstand.

⁂

The second time he woke, he was dreaming of fine pale wrists, the delicacy of the bones beneath the skin and the gentle roll of the unresisting joints in his grip. Suzuya made a small, soft sound, his breath hitting the hollow of Amon’s throat. Alone it wasn’t enough to draw him from sleep, but it was swiftly accompanied by some sleep-drugged squirming that launched him uncomfortably into wakefulness.

He released Suzuya’s wrists and mumbled an apology in a voice still heavy with sleep. Suzuya shrugged one shoulder and yawned, looking extraordinarily like a little white kitten. He tucked his newly-freed hands up under his chin and regarded Amon with eyes turned black by the half-light.

“Sun’ll be up soon,” he said. It sounded as if he was considering running away, like he had last time. Amon found—with some surprise—that he didn’t want him to.

“Stay for breakfast,” he said, trying to make it sound like a suggestion rather than a plea. He was acutely aware that there was nothing he could do to force an unwilling Suzuya to stay any longer than he wanted to, but Amon was half-asleep still, and the only idea that mattered was that he _wanted_ Suzuya to want to stay.

Suzuya heaved a sigh and rolled onto his back. “Why?” he asked, sprawled in the sliver of light cast by a streetlamp outside. Amon realized suddenly that they hadn’t bothered finding clothes before they’d gotten into bed. It hadn’t seemed relevant at the time; he supposed it didn’t make much difference now. He thought it ought to, but the more time he spent with Suzuya the more he found things that _ought to be_ often simply weren’t.

“Forget it,” he said, and turned his face back into his pillow. Suzuya would stay, or he would go. Amon’s reasons would have no bearing on it.

“I’ll stay,” Suzuya said immediately, which surprised him a little. “I asked because I was curious.”

“I’m trying to sleep,” Amon grumbled, as if his chest wasn’t tight with something he didn’t want to name just yet.

“Alright,” Suzuya said peaceably. He curled up on his side again and closed his eyes, but his breathing didn’t even out until he’d shuffled and wriggled his way back into Amon’s personal space. He fell asleep with his head tucked beneath Amon’s chin, drawing cool, ticklish breaths across his skin. Amon supposed this meant that he wasn’t particularly afraid of being molested in his sleep again, but he lay awake for the next hour anyway, until Suzuya stirred a second time.

“What’s for breakfast?” he said, and Amon could tell from his tone that he was thinking of something ridiculously unhealthy.

“What do you want?” he asked slowly.

Suzuya pressed his ear against Amon’s sternum. “Donuts?” he suggested hopefully.

“I don’t have any,” Amon said, trying to peer down at the mass of white hair plastered to his chest. “What are you doing?”

“Listening,” Suzuya said, which explained nothing.

“To what?”

“Your voice is really low this early in the morning,” Suzuya informed him cheerfully. “Did you ever notice that?”

Amon frowned, even though Suzuya wasn’t looking at him to see it. “My voice always sounds like this,” he said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Suzuya insisted, lifting his head and fixing Amon with an earnest stare. “It’s definitely lower. And kind of scratchy.”

“I don’t remember asking for a review of my morning voice,” Amon said testily, trying not to feel self-conscious just for speaking.

“But it’s nice,” Suzuya said blankly, as if he was completely nonplussed by the idea that anyone would be put off by his analysis. “You have a nice morning voice. I like it.”

“Well,” Amon said, and promptly ran out of words. He settled for repeating himself, once, with an air of finality, and hoped that would be an end to it.

Suzuya smiled at him—a little slyly, but still—and then he occupied himself with pressing his nose into the hollow of Amon’s collarbone. It was their only point of contact, which was merciful, since they were still distinctly lacking in anything resembling clothing. Amon wasn’t sure what he would have done if Suzuya had wanted to _cuddle_.

“Koutarou,” the boy said, and the sly edge to his smile was perfectly translated into the tone of his voice when he spoke. It was the second time he had used his first name, just that, as if they were close friends, or family—or lovers. He paused after he said it, like he was waiting to be reprimanded.

“Yes?” Amon said finally.

Suzuya drew a deep breath. “I was thinking about kissing you,” he said, an echo of his past self. “What do you think?”

And in this, the third instance, Amon surrendered with embarrassing speed, without even bothering to put up a token struggle. He put a hand out to touch Suzuya’s hair where it curled and clung to his jawline.

“I think it’s a stupid idea,” he said, “but don’t let that stop you.”

**Author's Note:**

> It seems ridiculous to present a work with apologies for its shortcomings, so I won't; but I will say that it gave me hell in the writing of it, and I still think it came out more as an experiment in style than a story. Having said that, if you read it all the way to this note, a thousand blessings upon you! And please, feel free to tell me what you thought.


End file.
